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couldn't get over his doubts, and watching the woman tugging at the hem of her cotton shift dress over and over and bemoaning her fate to have such a rotten son with her own blood, her own blood running through his veins, he paused a long second before following Lester toward the bedroom.
    The small room was immaculate. Not a boy's room at all, Bill thought, still working on his theory that this boy had beat town months, years before, or had been killed in Korea or maybe died before he'd reached adolescence. He'd seen stranger, after all.
    The twin bed was tidily made. A chair against one wall had a football resting on it. A snapshot of a pretty girl with a scarf sat on the dresser top, along with a small trophy. As Lester bent down to look under the bed, Bill moved to the trophy out of curiosity. He was thinking, This doesn't look like a sports trophy, more like a--
    It was at this moment that the closet door slammed open with a deadly clap and a boy of about fifteen stormed out with a thick Louisville Slugger in both hands. Before Bill could get his gun, the boy was on him, pounding. They both fell to the floor with a thud, and the mother was screaming in horror as Bill shouted to Lester, "Shoot him, shoot him," with the blows coming straight to his head.
    He could feel his skull cracking, denting like a melon before everything went blurry, then black.
    In what was actually only a few seconds later, Bill's eyes shot open just as the bat was about to come straight down on his head. He found himself shooting, and the boy fell backward, like a duck in a shooting gallery. The mother, apparendy just as surprised as Bill that her son was in the apartment, fainted in grand style. Fighting to keep conscious, Bill managed to radio for backup right before he passed out again.
    It turned out that Lester had panicked. When the boy began pummeling Bill, he ran out of the apartment, and they found him several blocks away, hiding in an alley.
    Bill was in the hospital for two weeks with a fractured skull, dislocated shoulder, and lacerations on his face and chest.
    The boy was seriously wounded but not killed. Bill, even in his half-conscious state, had managed to hit him in the shoulder to disable him.
    After he was discharged from the hospital, Bill was honored by the chief of police. His attacker turned out to have been involved in the murder of another officer earlier that day, and Bill became a minor Die a Little -- 20 --
    hero, which enabled his dreamed-for reassignment to the prosecutor's office, unheard of for a twenty-seven-year-old.
    I tell Alice all of this, and she is silent, washing slowly, eyes focused, mascara dewy, flecked. She listens as I try to tell her in a way to make her understand, understand everything. I know the way I tell it is everything: There is so much to know about my brother. Some things she might already understand, some things she should, she must recognize. When I finish, she looks at me with an expression heavy with meaning, about what she now knows about her husband and somehow, somehow what she now seems to think she knows about me.
    Suddenly, we are jolted out of the moment by a knock on the kitchen door. I walk over to the window, expecting to see a partygoer returning for a forgotten coat. Instead, it is a tiny, dark-haired girl who looks about sixteen.
    "Neighbor?" I ask, beckoning Alice.
    Alice looks past my shoulder. When she does, I see something pass over her face quickly but unmistakably.
    Recovering quickly, she assembles a smile of happy surprise at the intrusion and, nearly tumbling into the dish rack, moves past me to open the door.
    "Lois." She waves the girl in, wiping her hands on her apron.
    "Come in. Um, Lora, there's someone I'd like you to meet." With a sharp red grin, the girl enters. Closer now, I can see she is older than she first appeared, perhaps in her mid-twenties. And, as if in some slapstick silent movie about a misbehaving wife, she wears an unmistakable black eye.
    "Hi,